Rich Collins successfully answered Carl Mercier's question:

Ruby / Ruby on Rails:

I am building a database wrapper in a class. I want to expose a string array of people (ex: ['john','jane','lucie']) which basically wraps a comma-delimited string column in a legacy database (names are in the db as: 'john,jane,lucie').

I'd like to be able to do: foo.people[1] = 'mark', foo.people.pop or even foo.people.push('richard') and have the changes reflected in the database.

How do I hook into an array to be able to perform the underlying database operations? I'm not quite sure how to implement this correctly.

People succeed in answering Carl Mercier's questions 23% of the time (5 successes in 22 attempts).

Answers by: Rich Collins

Rich Collins's Answer:

Reply by Rich Collins 723 days ago

I would just use ActiveRecord's callback system.

before_save :set_legacy_column_from_array

def after_find
set_array_from_legacy_column
end

Reply by Rich Collins 723 days ago

forgot to format correctly, just read it from your email

Reply by Carl Mercier 723 days ago

Totally makes sense! Should have thought of that before... that's why I came here to ask the Ruby guru (aka: Rich)!

Thanks :) It's a lot easier than I thought after all!